Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) -- A Barclays Plc trading team that’s
leaving this year to start a quantitative investment firm will
take 60 bank employees with it, adding to Wall Street’s
migration to the $2.8 trillion hedge-fund industry.

Olivier Durantel, Gregoire Schneider, Antoine Fillet and
Maxime Fortin of the British bank’s nQuants unit will form the
venture, according to a person with knowledge of the plans, who
asked not to be identified because the information is private.
The firm, which hasn’t yet been named, will use algorithms to
trade mainly equities and other liquid securities globally.

Barclays Chief Executive Officer Antony Jenkins signaled
last year that the bank would exit businesses that don’t
interact with clients. NQuants, which Durantel and Schneider
originally founded at Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in 2000, has
been pooled within Barclays among non-core businesses and assets
the bank plans to sell or wind down under a reorganization
announced in May, according to the person. Barclays said that
month it would eliminate 7,000 jobs at its investment bank as it
faces pressure to boost returns.

The U.K.’s second largest lender rose 0.4 percent to 217
pence in London, paring declines this year to 20 percent.

Marc Hazelton, a spokesman for London-based Barclays, and
Durantel declined to comment on the departures and the new
firm’s plans.

NQuants’ Origins

Barclays won’t invest or take an ownership stake in the
quantitative firm, the person said. Among those joining are
David Jack, a managing director at the bank who ran the
Electronic Trading Technology group, which has had oversight of
Barclays’ dark pool, and Christopher Newman, who joined Barclays
this year from Israel Englander’s hedge-fund firm Millennium
Management LLC, where he was global head of operations,
according to the person.

NQuants, founded within Lehman Brothers in 2000 by Durantel
and Schneider, was sold to Barclays in 2008, following the
acquisition of the defunct bank’s North American operations.
Fillet joined nQuants in 2003 and Fortin in 2004.

Top bankers and traders have exited the biggest Wall Street
firms for more lucrative jobs in the hedge-fund industry as
regulation has intensified following the 2008 financial crisis
and lower returns have pushed banks to cut the amount of revenue
they set aside for compensation.

Mark Standish, the former co-head of RBC Capital Markets,
and Richard Tavoso, who oversees RBC’s global arbitrage and
trading business, are forming Taursa Capital Partners. The RBC
spinout will be among the biggest teams to leave a bank since
Peter Muller, who ran a trading group at Morgan Stanley, left in
2012 to start hedge-fund firm, PDT Partners LLC in New York.